NADA Wrap Up: The Good, Bad and Ugly

Convention hangover Monday 0:00

Steve Shaw: Welcome back, Dave. Happy Convention Monday.

Dave Rogers: Convention hangover Monday.

Steve Shaw: Hangover Monday. Awesome. So tell us, how was the convention for you? We've been talking about it the last couple of episodes, so we might as well jump right in.

Dave Rogers: It was busy, that's the first thing. They had it Wednesday, Thursday and a half day Friday, and I had to fly out Friday morning, so I crammed two and a half days into two days. A lot of good vendors, a lot of new stuff out there. I probably have a list of 15 or 20 vendors I never got to. I'm sure I'll be answering a bazillion emails for the next month and trying to set up a couple of demos, because they're relentless. Nine o'clock this Monday morning, I'm getting, "Hey, thanks for stopping by the booth. You ready to go? You ready to start?" I didn't even read all my emails from the weekend.

Steve Shaw: Yeah, sign up. You know what's funny? Many moons ago, when I first started my company, I met a guy at the convention, and he goes, "I like you, kid." His name was Dan. He goes, "Listen, I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to hire you. But don't you blankety-blank call me until February 22nd at 2 p.m." In fact, I think he said 2:05 p.m. "If you call me one minute before 2:05 p.m. on February 22nd, I will never pick up your call and I will never hire you." And I said, "Yes, sir."

So on February 22nd at 2:05 p.m., I called him up, and he goes, "Well, hello, Mr. Shaw. I've been waiting for your call." And I said, "Ready to hire me?" He goes, "Absolutely." He didn't want to mess with anybody for a month after the convention, but I did exactly what he said. I was a brand-new trainer, and he hired me on the spot on that first phone call. So that's what you've got to do: say, "Don't call me Monday. I've got shit to do."

Dave Rogers: I like that. That's really good. I'll have to try that one.

Steve Shaw: I'm full of wise ideas. Most people try them on.

Lost between the halls 2:06

Dave Rogers: Well, the one thing I got myself in a pickle over: there are two halls, the West and the North. Leading up to the convention, all you're doing is getting text messages and emails from all these vendors, whether you use them currently or not, and they're trying to book an appointment. Everyone's trying to fill their slots. So a few of them, like Cox, CDK and Reynolds and Reynolds, I do business with all three, asked me to set times with them, so I did, because they want to show me all the new stuff. That was easy enough, because I know they're always in the main hall.

But in between, I had some other ones I wanted to see, and I just set up appointments and put them in my planner, not to mention the time change difference that screwed up my planner. And when I get there, I realize these guys are all in different halls. I've got to finish up with CDK at 10 o'clock, and I've got to be in the North hall at 10 o'clock. There's no way. And you know, because you checked it out, there was a shortcut from the West to the North. It's 10 minutes if you take the shortcut, but they didn't let you take the shortcut on the way back, so it was a 25-minute walk. So your timing got all screwed up. Next time, I'm not setting any appointments. I'm going to do it at my pace when the map comes out.

So, lesson learned. I haven't been doing it that long. I'm not like you, going since you were a kid. It's only my sixth or seventh year, so I'm learning. And I'm looking forward to next year in Orlando. At least it's the same time zone. I can visit my daughter and my grandkids and make a little mini vacation beforehand, and I don't have to worry about staying up till God knows what time like I was some nights.

Steve Shaw: I'm still getting used to being back on the correct time zone. It's a mess. I was gone a few days early, in California meeting some friends and clients, and then Vegas. I'll just tell you, Vegas, they can have it. If it's back in Vegas again, I'm probably going to be busy that week. A $40 hamburger, a $30 burrito. I'm kind of over it.

Dave Rogers: I'll tell you, though, 73 degrees and sunny definitely made my day. That's all I cared about.

Steve Shaw: The weather was nice. Probably the only two places in the world it was tolerable were Vegas and Los Angeles.

Dave Rogers: Yeah, I heard you hit both places where it was perfect last week.

Light turnout and too much AI 4:26

Steve Shaw: Yes, exactly. But I cut out early. I was able to get the things I needed done on the first day. I spoke to an AI analytics company, which I think you talked to as well. I really liked them, and we worked out a pretty good program. I really like their analytics and what they had to say. And I worked with a training company, and it looks like we're going to put some stuff together. There are going to be some cool new things on the university that I was able to find.

I felt like the turnout was a little light from a dealer perspective, at least that's what I thought. Maybe it was just so spread out. I wandered around and did my thing without any appointments, and I felt like it was a pretty light turnout. I don't know any particular numbers, but I thought it was light. But I got everything done on the first day that I really needed to, and I cut out early on Thursday, the second day of the expo. I caught kind of a bad seat, but I got home, so I was happy to sleep in my own bed Thursday night and the entire weekend.

You probably can or can't tell, but I'm in a hotel right now in beautiful Cincinnati, Ohio. So back to work. These first few weeks are always pretty crazy for me, so I'm back on the road doing a little training. I felt like there was good information. I think AI was overhyped. Everything was AI, which I thought was a little ridiculous. But overall, I was able to get a lot accomplished. How about you? In all those meetings, did you find something you liked?

AI built into the DMS 6:07

Dave Rogers: Probably contrary to how I've been thinking the last couple of years, I spent some good time with CDK, Cox and Reynolds, and I was pretty impressed with the next step they've taken with AI built into their platforms. As you know, we've talked about it before, and a lot of times it's the integration issues that give me pause. I'm just not always comfortable with some of the privacy things, or how much information I'm giving to these third-party, fourth-party, fifth-party companies, whoever you're dealing with.

But CDK is building AI into their CRM, which is awesome, the way it's handling the leads and taking some of the mundane work out of sales. They're doing the same thing in service, helping the technicians write their stories a little bit. They have phone analytics. And the other thing I found out the other day is that a lot of this stuff doesn't get released until this week. They hold it back until the convention, and then they release it. So there will be some new phone analytics. We have WebEx phones connected with CDK, so we can get missed-call notifications. We can see a lot of different things in there we couldn't see before, in addition to the regular call pops and everything else, which I think are cool. They also have AI in there that'll transcribe your calls, so you can use them for training, which I think is good. It's a good step.

AI-graded multi-point videos and smart glasses 7:43

Dave Rogers: Cox, again, is using TrueVideo for their video platform, and they're going to be piloting AI in there as a rating system to show you the quality of the videos. I spent some time with Joe Shaker at TrueVideo. I sat through a presentation he was giving the CDK folks about some of the new technology with AI and the ratings, and using the glasses, which I think is a cool idea. So that stuff's coming down the pike. There's still a lot in pilot mode, but they're coming out with stuff.

Cox is doing a lot of integrations with the websites and their CRMs, where they're actually going to have an AI-designed website soon. I think Dealer.com is their website company now. So it would be customizable. If you want a website that shows all different things, your own customizable stuff, the AI helps you design your own website, which I thought was pretty cool.

Steve Shaw: That's cool. Just to jump in, I like the idea with the video company, where they're able to do analytics, transcribe, and then let your manager know the quality of the video. I didn't get a chance to meet with the muckety-mucks. That was the one meeting I was hoping to have that didn't come together. But I like what they had to say and how that was going to work. That was pretty awesome from the MPI perspective.

Dave Rogers: Yeah. Meeting with the guys over at TrueVideo and watching some of the stuff, there's a big collaboration going on between TrueVideo and the DMSs. Joe Shaker, I think it is, and his team are invested in making this stuff work so you're not in a different platform, which I think is great. It's embedded in the system and it's working well. And when you look at the next step, the tech puts the glasses on with the AI, and while you're walking around the car, it's taking the video as you walk. It's going to be able to recognize, "That's the master cylinder, that's the alternator." It'll actually box it and show the customer so they know what you're talking about.

Steve Shaw: Okay, that's pretty awesome, because we were talking about this today at the group I'm with. The one thing I actually enjoyed, although I shouldn't say this, because I don't think the speaker was that great, but I listened to the message and tried to get beyond that, was the TikTok thing. We were talking today about TikTok and the way we make the multi-point. I think you and I talked about this at one point as well, because I'll find myself getting caught up in reels. I'll watch a reel, and another reel, and another. That's the attention span of a lot of people.

So I talked to Craig, one of my trainers, and I was like, "Okay, we've got to take this multi-point inspection video presentation and make it into something that's watchable, that the customer is going to see, and it's got to be quick." I didn't get to see those glasses, but that really dovetails nicely into where we're going. If you can click and take a picture, or integrate that and then move on, like the software we use for our podcasts that automatically creates reels.

A gentleman at one of the stores here was really into TikTok, and he's trying to build a TikTok presence for the company, which was really interesting. I read his proposal, and it was pretty awesome. So if you could make a TikTok-style, reel-style multi-point where you do the five steps, get to the point, get to the failed items and get out before the customer has a chance to fall asleep or lose interest, I think those glasses and everything you're saying would dovetail really nicely into that next generation of multi-point inspection videos. Some people aren't even doing multi-points, and these guys, and this isn't even a shameless plug for them, it's just something we ran into, are already taking the next step while some people haven't even gotten to video. It would be interesting to get deeper into that.

Dave Rogers: And the overriding message from the video company was: phase one, get the videos done. Get your 80, 90% utilization and make it an accepted practice. Phase two is improving the quality. That's what these guys are trying to figure out. So there's a rating system. The AI can grade a video on 30 different criteria, whatever it is, and then you can learn from it. Some of the metrics they're quoting, who knows if it's true, they could be padding next year's earnings, but when they look at the quality of the video as ranked by the AI or a peer, the customer is more apt to buy. It's not just that they'll watch it; they're actually more apt to purchase whatever you're selling. So phase two is going to be making the videos better, which I think is great.

Steve Shaw: Well, I think that would be a great use of AI. It could grade it and rank it, and then you could see that this way gives the customer more of a chance to purchase than saying it that way. That would be super cool to have embedded in the MPI videos. I'd definitely like to learn more about that. Like I said, that was the one stop I didn't get a chance to make. We were trying to coordinate, and it just didn't work out before I left on Thursday.

Pinewood, Tekion and voice-written tech stories 13:49

Dave Rogers: And then there's a company called Pinewood AI. Pinewood is the DMS technology company that I guess was part of the Lithia purchase over in the UK. I think this was their first year there, and I met with them. They have a DMS, and I don't know if anybody is using it yet. They have a CRM, and again, I'm not sure if anyone's using that yet. I don't know if Lithia is rolling it out. But they had this web chat and some of these AI tools that were really, really slick. I'm looking at it thinking, we'll wait. Let's see what Lithia does. Let's see if they put it in their 400 dealerships, because they've got to do it, they own the company. But I'd be interested to see how that goes, because I think this is 10 times better than what Tekion is. People I talk to right now say Tekion's CRM still isn't ready, and that's what they started with.

Listen, I'm all for these companies. I think it's great that there are other solutions out there, but I feel bad for the guys who jump in early, because they usually seem to regret it. So I put Pinewood on what I call my watch list. They had some good stuff. Reynolds and Reynolds had their reporting tool, which I thought was good. They have another program that's AI-based, tracking web visits, and it integrates with their CRM, which I thought was pretty cool. There was another one trying to incorporate AI with the tech notes, cause and correction, which was awesome. You look at this stuff and go, okay, finally we're going to get to where the techs can use it. Because the next one, I think, is when they use these Meta glasses and they're talking. I think they could start using that to do their cause and corrections, which would be awesome. Now the tech doesn't even have to type anymore. He could be outside having a cigarette filling out his three C's, and he'd be thrilled. That'd be utopia for some techs.

Steve Shaw: That's like your buddy you used to work with at the Chrysler store, who you always had to call in to make sure he did his tech notes right. What an amazing technology that would be, for somebody not to have to type and write. And coming from a guy who struggles typing at this moment in life, when I hit the function key, I can just talk and it does talk to text. Gosh, if I had the glasses, I like that idea, and it would certainly help the technicians get their stories down. I can imagine just verbalizing what I did versus being a technician who types with one finger. What's going to be the better story? If I could just verbalize everything I did and hit enter, wow, that would be a game changer for a dealership. You might actually get paid.

Pictures, warranty fraud and seeing yourself on video 16:43

Dave Rogers: I think it'd be a game changer for the techs, to streamline the notes and some of the stuff they have to put in. I got into a discussion with one of the manufacturers the other day about pictures of the VIN plate, pictures of the license plate, pictures of the odometer, pictures of the old part, pictures of the new part. And I asked them, "Do you have training to teach these guys to take pictures? Do you have a photography class?" I don't want to hear it.

Steve Shaw: That's the worst. We're just trying to fix a car here.

Dave Rogers: Right. And they're trying to tell you it'll save time, you don't have to punch in and punch out. I said, "These guys would rather punch in and punch out than take all these pictures. Come on." But I think there's going to be a blend with these glasses. I see it happening eventually, and the guys from TrueVideo are saying they're getting some interest from the manufacturers: if the tech was wearing the glasses and recorded the fact that he replaced the part, maybe he doesn't have to write a story. Maybe you upload the video with it and you get paid for the claim. That would be pretty cool. You stop all the fraud, all the BS that goes on. That's what makes it difficult for the good dealers: the bad people are still out there committing warranty fraud.

It's a multibillion-dollar business for them, paying warranty claims, so I don't blame them for trying to mitigate their losses. So I was thinking about it: you put the glasses on, you start on the car, and there's your time punch. If you don't put it on pause, from start to finish they can see the car was leaking oil. They can see everything you did to fix the car. Maybe that's all it takes. They were hinting at that, but they haven't gotten there yet.

Steve Shaw: I'd say you've got a pretty optimistic attitude. If that could come together, it'd be pretty amazing. I like the idea, though. We don't do it as much as we used to, but we used to have our video glasses, and we would role play and practice. We'd have a customer with the glasses on, and they would role play the tech and the advisor and everything they did. It was super fun to watch people improve, because they watched themselves from a customer's perspective. They could rewatch the video of themselves doing it. I saw more people make corrections from seeing themselves through the glasses than would ever come from you or me correcting them.

In fact, I had a fixed ops director I loved to death, with a ton of experience. He was watching the video as we practiced, and when he shook my hand, he noticed that he looked down. He goes, "I can't believe it," because he looked away or did something funny when he was shaking my hand, like he wasn't looking me in the eye. He says, "I can't believe I've been doing this my whole entire life." And all of a sudden it changed how he did it. He made a point to look you in the eye when he shook your hand. So the idea of video is very powerful, and the glasses catch everything. I'm just filtering it through my Steve Shaw training lens, I guess, because today I'm working on the drive. How amazing would it be if we could actually make that work in our stores?

Dave Rogers: Yeah, there is something powerful about video that way, for people watching it and role playing. Kids now live on FaceTime. They're almost always on stage. Older folks aren't really like that. We didn't grow up looking at video phones. That was a pipe dream when we were kids. I was still doing the dial. You hated anybody with a nine in their number, the bastard.

Steve Shaw: You're really showing your age now. Did you have the cord that was 12 feet long, so you could go sit down on the couch?

Dave Rogers: Yeah. I remember when they came out with touch-tone and you'd hit the buttons. This house I bought, the couple we bought it from had been here for years, and they still had the house phones on the walls. Gina was like, "We should get one of those." And I'm like, "No, we shouldn't. I'm not hanging a house phone on the wall."

Steve Shaw: Well, it keeps the kids off the phone. That's what you want.

Phone AI, scheduling and reporting tools 21:13

Steve Shaw: Anything else you saw there that you really liked?

Dave Rogers: I saw a couple of standalone AI companies out there with some good ratings for calls, texts, data mining, and a backstop in case the customer hangs up. That's my concern. I see it all the time with phone AI: the customer hangs up when they get it. So there's a company, MIA, which I think looked like it had some promise, and a lot of good reviews from people I've talked to. If you hang up the phone on MIA, it will text you: "I'm sorry we got disconnected. Is there something I can help you with?" I thought that was a cool feature. And there are a couple of dealerships I want to check, so I'll phone test them as I go.

Then there were some reporting mechanisms I looked at. I think I need better reporting for what we're doing. I'm not really thrilled with some of the current stuff we have, so I'm just trying to see what else is out there. Nobody in the reporting world threw AI at me, so I assume they don't have it yet. Although we did talk to one guy with appointment scheduling who was using AI. Dave, wasn't it?

Steve Shaw: Yeah, the AI appointment scheduling was Dave from Evenflow.

Dave Rogers: Evenflow, yeah. That looked like pretty cool technology.

Steve Shaw: It sounded like what you and I were talking about, when we used to do the charts and the graphs and plot it all out. It sounded like he's got a handle on that, so we're definitely going to talk more. And then the Chameleon company. It sounds like they're doing reporting with a little bit of analytics, or moving toward AI analytics, I guess.

Dave Rogers: Yeah, I'd heard of them. You had mentioned them, and I'd heard of them in one of the chat groups I'm in, and the guy talking about them was real high on them. They have a little more than just reporting. There's a lot of good stuff in there as far as everyday KPIs. There are expenses in there, which is great. Tracking your used cars, tracking your oldest internals. You can set alerts for yourself. It drives me crazy when I see month-end and you've got 20 PDIs open. To me, you just didn't want it bad enough.

Now, I'm going to give a little bit of grace, because the manufacturers lately have been jamming cars down your throat in the last two or three days of the month. They are. So I'm not going to blame my guys 100% of the time when I see it. But if I was the service manager running that store, there's a PDI party happening. I'm ordering pizza, I'm firing up the barbecue, and we're not going home until the PDIs are done. That's free money.

Steve Shaw: That drives me insane when there's a PDI left over at the end of the month. Oh no, that's not happening.

Dave Rogers: My guys and gals in my stores have no idea how much better this-age Dave Rogers is than 20 years ago, because I would lose my shit. You learn after a while it's just not worth it. But it amazes me how some people just don't get it. It's free money sitting there. Get it all in. It's a different world, my friend Steve. But I thought it was good technology and good reporting, because it could show you how many open PDIs you've got, how many open used cars you haven't gotten to. I thought that was a good feature to have in that reporting tool.

Steve Shaw: Yeah, I agree. I really liked having a conversation with them. I talked with them quite a bit, and we talked about manager training and learning these things. They told me that in their software, it says gross profit, and if you don't know what gross profit is, you hover your mouse over it, and it tells you what gross is. And then there might be a video of somebody, I'm not saying who, saying, "This is how gross profit is calculated." Or you hover over ELR and get a description, and somebody, I'm not saying who it might be, goes, "This is how ELR is calculated, and this is what it means to you in your store." I thought that was a cool feature. If that could all be pulled off, it's certainly next level from an analytics and training perspective.

Could you imagine if you hovered over PDI, or internal, and it said, "You have 25 open PDIs, which represents this much money sitting here," and then it slapped you around and said, "Get these effing PDIs done"?

Dave Rogers: That's what it should do. It should actually smack you around. Well, the one report they had in there that was great was a work-in-process report. It was just flat out how much you have in work in process and how much you have in work in process over two days. And I was like, now that's a good number. I used to always calculate my work in process, how much it was in gross. But how much is over two days? I like that. It was showing you RO by RO, at some of these franchises where they just sit on these cars.

Steve Shaw: Yeah, I remember when I'd do my manual calculation every day, it would be booked hours and then flagged hours. I tracked what was in the system against what the technicians had flagged, and they had to marry up at the end of the month. My report had to marry up. So it would be super cool if that could be done automatically for somebody.

Dave Rogers: We used to do that all the time. We used to run the closed hours and the booked hours, and the difference between the two was the WIP. That's how we knew what was in our WIP. Real quick math: "Okay, I've got 100 hours in WIP." Again, it's a lost art. A lot of guys don't do it.

AI role play, and a GM tip: call your DMS rep 27:10

Steve Shaw: Right, exactly. The other thing I really liked, and we touched on this before, was the AI role play from a training company. If it's possible for them to take our training and turn it into an AI customer, the service advisor can take a class, do the quiz, and then go role play with an AI. And similar to the video, the AI can grade you and say, "Well, you said this and not this. I need you to focus more on this." If that AI could marry all that together, where you're role playing with a real-life, quote-unquote, AI customer, I think that's a game changer in our world. We're going to work together on some things like that. I'm hoping it's real, but let's say it's a year away. It's still something in the very near future that we can bridge into the training, which I think will be great for all of our stores.

Dave Rogers: Yeah, no, I agree.

Steve Shaw: Other than that, we're running pretty long. Other than spending a ton of money, I did not spend $1 on gambling. I did not gamble a buck, and I was very happy about that.

Dave Rogers: Me either.

Steve Shaw: But overall, I think it was a good trip, and I'm looking forward to next year when it's closer to home. I wouldn't miss it. I still saw a bunch of people I know, and there were a couple of guys I didn't get to see. I think it's as much about the people as the products, catching up with all those guys. That's pretty good stuff.

Dave Rogers: It absolutely is. It's hard to get it all in. That's the other thing. You get all these invites to after-hours things. Every vendor is trying to get you to stay late and go to a happy hour or hors d'oeuvres. There's some politics; we have to schmooze with some of our preferred vendors. But I left the heavy lift to the owners. Let them go hang out with the bankers and all the guys who get the money. I hung out with some of the vendors. I run into a lot of people at the same thing, and there are a lot of good people in this business.

One of the things that really popped into my head, and I guess if I'm going to give a tip today, it's this: CDK, Reynolds, Cox, Tekion, I don't care who you're using, they're constantly coming out with these improvements and changes. I was talking to one of the guys about it. When I was a service manager, I used to come to work every day at 6:30 in the morning and turn on my computer, and a little release note would pop up that ADP or Reynolds had a new release, and I would open it up and read it. Like an idiot, I would read it.

Steve Shaw: You're the only one who ever did that.

Dave Rogers: Well, that's probably why I knew more about CDK and Reynolds and Reynolds than anybody else I worked with. And I get it, there's a lot going on and people are busy. Not everybody shows up early, and if you do, you're getting tugged and pulled. But as a general manager, you owe it to yourself to get down with your CDK rep or your Reynolds rep, whatever your DMS rep is, and spend an hour here and there talking about what's coming out and what's new. Because I've been wasting a lot of time looking at some of these third-party vendors, and this stuff's going to be right there in front of me.

Now, whether you want to put all your eggs in one basket or not is a different topic for a different day. But the bottom line is, I could have saved a lot of time had I known some of this stuff was coming down the pike. We owe it to ourselves to figure out: is our current DMS provider going to give us this next step, or do I have to go outside and look? Nobody's going to read the release notes. I get that. But you've got to get the information somewhere. If you can't make it out to NADA, then you've really got to get together with your vendors and see what's coming down the pike, because it's there. You just have to open your eyes, listen and make an hour's worth of time to see what they've got.

Steve Shaw: That's awesome. Well, one thing I learned, and I think we should table this for our next visit: you were talking about meeting times. I think we need to talk about promise times and setting up promise times sooner rather than later. I know we've got some mobile service discussions and some other things coming up, but we definitely have to talk about scheduling promise times, because that's near and dear to my heart, especially after a few things that happened to me regarding meeting times, scheduled times and promise times. So let's put that on the agenda.

And everybody, hey, we have a ton of traction with everybody who's starting to see it. I'll go look and let you know next visit where we are. We cracked the top 10%, I think, a long time ago, so let's see where we are now. But I'll tell you what, we're getting a ton of traction with our videos, views and subscribers. So everybody out there, I'm going to be like everybody else and say, hit the subscribe button. Give us a like and a subscribe, because we are crushing it right now. Thank you, everybody, and let's catch up in a couple of days.

Dave Rogers: You got it, man. Talk to you later.